This book comes on the 50th anniversary of the release of Unitatis Redintegratio, which was Vatican II’s Declaration on Ecumenism, which forms the starting point of the book’s inquiry. The central question is whether, as paragraph 12 of the Declaration suggests, social justice can be a means of fostering Christian unity in the context of postmodernity. It is a simple question becomes the launch point into a number of inquiries concerning Christian action, political theory and ultimately, ecclesiology (click here for the full synopsis).

The book has been listed as “notable” by the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, and has received endorsements from Tracey Rowland of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, as well as Benjamin Myers of the United Theological College, who also blogs at Faith and Theology. The endorsements could be found below

“This represents a long-overdue critique of self-secularizing practices in post-conciliar Catholicism. Tan shows how conceptions of the autonomy of the secular have allowed Christian charitable works to be culturally outflanked in the secular sphere. He argues that if the ecclesiology of the church as chaplain to the capitalist order has relegated the body of Christ to merely a subsection of a public circumscribed by the state/society/market complex, then the body of Christ ought to be repositioned to become a public in its own right.

—Tracey Rowland

“Tan argues that the church must be embodied sacramentally as a ‘public’ in its own right—not a chaplain to society, but a wholesale alternative vision of society. Only within the context of such an alternative social order can projects of justice become meaningful Christian witness. This is an important and timely contribution to a theology of culture, and a provocative reassessment of the relation between word and deed in Christian witness.”

—Benjamin Myers

Wipf & Stock have made the book available for purchase on their website and it can be accessed by clicking here.